“There I was, a-digging this hole..

(Courtesy of Bernard Cribbens [opens YouTube])
“Hole in the ground, so big and sort of round it was
And there was I, digging it deep
It was flat at at the bottom and the sides were steep
When along comes this bloke in a bowler which he lifted and scratched his head
Well he looked down the hole, poor demented [...]

A pruning job, and firewood

The closer I get to these elder trees, the more I realise that a major pruning job is probably what’s required. Some of them are quite broken in places and not growing healthily.

Someone has built a kind of fence underneath them, now collapsed:

– and there are the remains of an old gate in [...]

I mowed the new grass!

Albeit in a very on-grid kind of way…

That’s 100m of cabling coming from the house. It works very well on that frame and reel, except that you need three hands to roll it back up again, going home. Hmm. Maybe I should change the name of this blog to On-Grid.
As regards making some off-grid [...]

Hearth and home

We’ve spent quite a lot of time thinking and talking about fireplaces. I was really inspired by the central, floor-level hearth of Meduseld, the Golden Hall at Edoras in the Lord of the Rings films. (I blogged something about it at the time here.)

I like the versatility of this idea. The iron frame is removeable [...]